American Realness 2017

January 5-12

Founded, Directed and Curated by Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor, American Realness returns January 5-12, 2017, for its eighth consecutive season. Now under the leadership of Gibney Dance with Pryor as its new Director of Performance & Residencies, American Realness will continue to work with founding partner Abrons Arts Center, as well as other institutions throughout the city. The festival’s PERFORMANCE program utilizes theaters at Abrons and Gibney Dance’s Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center to construct a constellation of dance and performance works featuring five world premieres, four U.S. premieres, and six encore engagements for a total of fifty-three performances of sixteen productions over eight days. The program additionally includes a PROCESS program featuring new works in development and a DISCOURSE program curated by Ali Rosa-Sales that features public conversations and commissioned essays for READING, the American Realness online journal.

American Realness calls attention to new artistic production from socially and aesthetically marginal and subversive artists tearing at the boundaries of form and wrestling with the realities of identity. Through visual, visceral and text-based explorations of perception, sensation, form and attention, the artists of American Realness propose ruptures in the fabric of contemporary thought. Exploring fugitivity, empathy, inscripture, erasure, the labor of being the other, the breakdown of white-supremacist hierarchies, the thumping bass of pop culture, and the economy of performance, American Realness celebrates the artistic practice and value of the other in an American-focused, globally minded context. This is realness as resistance.

Four US Premieres:
• Meg Stuart, An evening of solo works Co-Presented with Goethe-Institut and the Federal Foreign Office of Germany
• Dana Michel, Mercurial George
• Ligia Lewis, minor matter Co-Presented with Lumberyard, formerly American Dance Institute/ADI
• Karol Tyminski, This is a musical